Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.

i'm not so sure. they hired william kristol, who demonstrated his contempt for the times by being a shitty columnist even by his own standards and taking its money for a year. i wonder if another marquee conservative wouldn't do basically the same.

Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.

But this very much sums up the view of a certain segment of the moneyed right -- the idea that progressive taxation has nothing to do with the traditional goals of the Democratic party, but is in fact a means of "punishing" successful people -- as if the idea were to take away half their money and then set it on fire!

Do you want to be an extremely "successful" person (as in you have a shit-ton of money) or do you want to live in a successful society where the actual success of those who do well in business reflect in the quality of the world you live in and enrich the communities responsible for generating that wealth and create a fertile environment for more successes?

People who think success is measured only in dollars they get paid are like kids who think about goal completion only in terms of how many cookies or toys they get

Repeat offenses: armchair sociology, easy generalizations in lieu of research or analysis, boringness.

Representative quote:

“The magic is not felt by a lot of people. It’s not felt, obviously, by a lot of less educated people, downscale people. They just look at Obama, and they don’t see anything. And so, Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee’s salad bar, and people think he fits in naturally there.”

He can make a defense of racist demagoguing sound benign. He obfuscates and misleads on income inequality, while, as always, accusing those damned coastal liberal elites of disrespecting Real Americans. Accusing liberals of disrespecting Real Americans is one of Brooks’ go-to lines, even though there’s absolutely no evidence that he has any clue whatsoever how the middle and working classes live in America in 2011.

Everything, with Brooks, comes down to “values.” Bad things happen because of a lack of the correct “values,” and the correct “values” are essentially white upper-middle-class mid-20th-century bourgeois values. Poverty happens because the poor don’t have those values. Earthquakes happen because of a lack of those values. The sexual abuse of children happens because — you guessed it — America lost those important pre-’60s values. The abuses at Penn State, in Brooks’ worldview, went unreported because America has become “a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness.”

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:That linked column on the abuses at Penn State was the sanitized version of Brooks’ comments on “Meet the Press,” in which he blamed both the failure to report the sexual abuses to the police and the riots following the firing of Joe Paterno more explicitly on “30 or 40 years” of “muddying the moral waters.” If it weren’t for women’s lib and the self-esteem movement, those kids could’ve been protected!

It’s always interesting to read the quotations of people who knew a mass murderer before he killed. They usually express complete bafflement that a person who seemed so kind and normal could do something so horrific.

He had a stupid one earlier in the week again imploring Obama to cut entitlements and debt and balance the budget now in a right-wing conservative manner, but which he redefines as moderate and sensible. It was formula David Brooks.

Details: The New York Times op-ed columnist and wife Sarah are trading up — from their longtime home near Bethesda’s Burning Tree Club to a century-old (exquisitely renovated) five bedroom, four-and-a-half bath house in Cleveland Park. It includes a two-car garage, iron and stone fence, generous-sized porch and balcony, and what appear to be vast spaces for entertaining. The timing seems to have been right: After only a few days on the market, their old place (which also boasts five bedrooms) is under contract for $1.6 million.